[SOC] Speedballs, the Wonderful World of Walmart, Twinkies, Monopolism

This is the time of the year when I suffer constantly from colds/flu/airborne HIV or whatever these bugs are that make me cough, hack, wheeze, and make me feel tired and dizzy and wanting sleep and/or death. My only antidote is a speedball which is a gulp of DayQuil, two ibuprofen, and as much coffee as my system can absorb. I think this is what killed Belushi. But I digress. . .

The thing that has absorbed my thought the most lately has been Walmart, and I don't mean because of Christmas shopping. I was incensed to learn that Walmart actually tells employees how to get on public assistance and encourages them to get food stamps. It blew my mind. As a libertarian, I always told people that the best welfare program was a job. Apparently, that is no longer the case.

How does Walmart get away with it? How are they able to pay workers such a pittance of a wage that these people cannot even afford to live without government handouts? How is Walmart which makes billions only able to keep two checkout lanes open even though they have 20 of them? And don't get me started on those self checkout things.

Walmart is a monopoly. It is a tenet of Austrian economics that no natural monopoly can exist in a free market. Naturally, if there is a single speck of government involvement than a free market does not exist. You can see the absurdity in this argument. The reality is that monopolies do emerge in free markets almost always. At some point, they achieve a position of bargaining power that no one can surmount. Telling a Walmart worker to go find a better job is stupid when you consider that Walmart has decimated its competitors. The ones that remain in business are as bad as Walmart.

Not all companies are like Walmart. Costco is not like Walmart. Neither is Publix. Both are really good outfits. I was in a Publix recently, and the products were not pricey at all. Service was excellent.

The flipside of Walmart is the Hostess company that makes Twinkies. They declared bankruptcy to get out of union obligations. Of course, when union rules tell you bread is delivered in one truck while Twinkies get delivered in another truck, that is dumb. Unions can be as bad as clueless management to the health of a company. What is the answer?

I think the answer for these problems is shared reward/sacrifice. Management and owners don't want to share the rewards. This would be Walmart. Unions don't want to share the sacrifice. This would be Hostess. The best way would be a cooperative where rewards and sacrifice are shared. Or, you can have a company that pays a base wage and a percentage bonus on earnings. This would be an outfit like Nucor that makes steel.

In economics, people respond to incentives, and nothing incentivizes more than having a piece of the action. This is the aim of distributism. Ownership needs to be in the greatest number of hands. Basically, Chesterton was right. The problem with capitalism is there are too few capitalists. They shouldn't even be called capitalists but monopolists. This is what Walmart practices.

I am thinking very much about economics these days, and I see a lot of deficiencies in both Austrian and Chicago School economic theories. As such, I am taking a broader view on things keeping what I agree with while disposing of that which can't be true. Natural monopolies exist. The Austrians are wrong.

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